Sign-Off

The long and complicated career of Dan Rather.

”A lot of people know Dan, and nobody knows him,” one of his producers says.

Photograph by Martin Schoeller / Corbis

On the door to Dan Rather’s office at CBS are two fading gold lines of script: “Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, / That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.” The quotation, Rather told me—the words of the Spartans who died holding off the Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae—has served as an inspiration ever since Mrs. Spencer, his fourth-grade teacher in Houston, Texas, first read it aloud in class. “They fought to the last man,” he said. “I read that as loyalty. That’s what it’s come to mean to me. Loyal to the very end. Loyal to their beliefs. Loyal to their code.” Rather, it was clear, was talking about himself; it was December, and he and several CBS News colleagues were awaiting the results of an outside investigation into their work which threatened their livelihoods and their reputations.

Rather’s office is, at first glance, gloomy, dimly lighted, filled with old, dark furniture and mementos of his career: a camouflage shirt, from his time covering the war in Vietnam, and a wool hat and shawl that he wore getting into Afghanistan soon after the Soviet invasion, in 1980—his “Gunga Dan” moment. A Royal typewriter dominates his desk, though he never uses it. It is there, he said, because “it reminds me of what I aspire to be—I want to be a great reporter.”

A meteorological sign for hurricanes is woven into the left forearm of many of Rather’s shirts; Rather got his start at CBS after covering Hurricane Carla, in September of 1961. “The thing on my sleeve,” he explained, is a warning: “ ‘Do not forget who you are and what got you here.’ ” Upon becoming the anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” in 1981, Rather worried that if he stayed in the studio he “would come across as something phony.” He went on, “And the one thing I hope, and I believe, is that even my enemies think that I am authentic. In my heart, my marrow, I am a reporter. And one who doesn’t play it safe.” Not long after this conversation, Rather went off to Thailand, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka, to cover the tsunami; two weeks later, he was in Iraq for the election.

Since assuming the anchor chair, from Walter Cronkite, Rather has been what Jim Murphy, the executive producer of the “CBS Evening News,” calls a “voice of God”—a reference to the authority of the three network anchors, who together address nearly thirty million viewers nightly. In the past twenty years or so, the authority of this divine collective voice has greatly diminished, but the anchors nevertheless still play a number of roles—host, reporter, and, in times of crisis, reassuring guide. Rather spreads himself thin. For “60 Minutes Wednesday,” he is a correspondent. For CBS Radio, he is a daily commentator. For the network, he is the figurehead, the lead reporter, the managing editor, and the brand—the star to be trotted out for advertisers. Between seven and eight million people watch his show each night, and his viewers are aware of his quirks, his “Ratherisms”—those odd, down-home expressions that come tumbling out during the election season. (“This race is shakier than cafeteria Jell-O.”) Rather compares the anchor job “to a very high trapeze act, frequently with no net.”

At the beginning of 2005, Rather and the “CBS Evening News” were in third place in the nightly-news ratings, as they had been for a decade. But Rather’s situation had been particularly precarious since September 8th, when “60 Minutes Wednesday” aired a report on President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, from 1968 to 1973, that turned out to be deeply flawed. (The report had something new—a former Texas lieutenant governor, Ben Barnes, a Democrat, acknowledged on camera for the first time that he tried to help get Bush into the Guard—but, relying in part on dubious documents, it also asserted a more explosive charge: that Bush’s superiors allowed him to skip his military obligations.) In November, while the outside panel, appointed by CBS, investigated, Rather announced that he would step down from the anchor desk on March 9th, at least a year before he had originally planned to retire.

Not only did Rather find it hard to let go but his future at CBS was suddenly unclear. It was announced that he would become a full-time correspondent, primarily for “60 Minutes Wednesday,” whose ratings are relatively low. Then, in January, Leslie Moonves, the co-chairman of CBS and the co-president of Viacom, which owns CBS, told the Times that Rather would continue his career on the “60 Minutes Wednesday” program “provided the show continues.” Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News, whom Rather had helped recruit from WCBS-TV, the local CBS affiliate in New York, and who had been Rather’s executive producer, was talking to people within the news division about who should succeed Rather, and talking to Moonves about changing the format of the newscast—without consulting Rather. (Rather’s successor has not been announced. Bob Schieffer, the chief Washington correspondent and the moderator of “Face the Nation,” was asked in early February to be his interim replacement, starting on March 10th, an appointment that Rather did not learn about until the public did.) Then, in early January, the outside panel released its report: it was an utterly damning study, which took CBS News to task for the National Guard story and for a stubborn refusal to acknowledge mistakes.

The day after the report was issued, Rather sent an e-mail to all CBS News employees saying only that he would “keep its lessons well in mind.” He did not say much else, and when, a few days later, I was scheduling an interview with him, his spokesperson, Kim Akhtar, cautioned me that he wouldn’t talk about the report. But Rather always tries to be gracious, and he did talk about it. Four CBS employees who were close to him were fired or asked to leave in the wake of the panel’s findings, and Rather seemed to compare them to the Spartans. “To people who have been so loyal and true, I’m not going to give up on them,” he said, then continued, “I appeared before the panel two times for a total of eleven hours. Both times, I told the panel that if I had to move this afternoon on a big story, one that had the potential of being controversial, I’d be very happy to go on that story with the same people, each and every one.”

Normally, Dan Rather is driven from his apartment, on the Upper East Side, to his office, at CBS headquarters, on West Fifty-seventh Street, sometime in the late morning. On Friday, January 14th, when I spent the day with him, he arrived at his office, on the second floor, before nine. He hung up his suit jacket, and walked downstairs to what’s known as “the fishbowl,” where those who work in the main newsroom can watch senior producers assembling the nightly newscast. Before I arrived, a staff member warned me to expect “a full Rothenberg,” a performance named for a former Associated Press television writer, for whom Rather once pretended to be more involved in shaping the daily broadcast—barking orders, assigning stories, writing copy—than he actually was. In reality, most news decisions are made by the executive producer; in the A.P. story, he seemed like a combination of Perry White and Jimmy Olsen.

As it turned out, I witnessed a modified version of the full Rothenberg. Rather moved about jacketless, his shirt collar open, his tie askew. His gray sideburns are unfashionably long, and his hair is short, making his large, slightly pointy ears more prominent. Rather’s cleft chin is not as pronounced as it appears on television screens, and the circles under his eyes are deep. He is seventy-three but looks younger. Standing behind Murphy, the executive producer, who was staring at a computer monitor, Rather asked, eagerly, “What’s the big story?”

Murphy, who wears small rimless glasses and has a full mustache, never took his eyes off the lineup on his screen; in the end, there would be nine or so pieces, running from ninety seconds to two and a half minutes, and a dozen or so news reports called “tells,” which the anchor reads. “It looks like Iraq,” Murphy said briskly. The Iraq story would consist of a package of two or three segments, he said, including one on a C.I.A. analysis featured in that morning’s Times, and a report from David Martin, the chief national-security correspondent, who was travelling with United States troops in Tikrit. There would also be a report from Indonesia, Murphy said. Today was Murphy’s fifth anniversary as Rather’s executive producer; he’s had the longest tenure of any of Rather’s executive-producer partners, and the two men are usually in synch.

Rather was now pacing the floor like an admiral on the deck. He said, “I still don’t think we’ve done justice on the air to an Indonesian overview” of how the Muslim government is suspicious of Western aid and yet grateful for it. “Then, there’s the corruption business, whether money may be scraped off.” Murphy and the other producers listened, but they responded only with silent nods. Finally, Rather said to Murphy, “I’m not saying we got to get to all that today, but I’m looking for a wide shot.” Pausing, his arms folded, Rather asked, “What else?”

Still without looking up from his screen, Murphy mentioned floods in the Midwest, and said that there would be a correspondent and a producer on the scene that morning. A telephone rang, and Rather lunged for it: “Evening news. Rather.” The call was from Mike Solmsen, a field producer in Indonesia, who, obviously surprised, asked, “Who is this?”

“This is Dan Rather.”

Solmsen asked Rather to tell the producers that he would complete his story script in an hour.

“Murphy says you’re in,” Rather said, and asked Solmsen to relay a message to the correspondent Byron Pitts. “Remind Pitts of the Rather Rule,” he said. “Don’t drink the water. Don’t eat the meat. O.K. Go hard.” Rather was approaching a full Rothenberg moment.

Each morning, Murphy and the other producers go through a stack of newspapers on their desks. Rather mentioned a story in the Christian Science Monitor on the separatist rebels on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Since there were no pictures, Murphy said he was dubious. Rather conceded, “It’s a tough story for television.” And so they moved on.

The phone rang again and Rather lunged for it: “Rather.” This caller was also startled to hear Rather’s voice, and Rather again had to explain who he was: “It’s Dan Rather.” This was a slow news day. “Good day to break a story,” Rather said.

Rather asked Murphy, “What about the end piece? What are you thinking?” The story that closes the broadcast is usually a feature. Murphy called up a tape of a piece about how Iran is now, in the words of the correspondent Elizabeth Palmer, “the nose-job capital of the world,” where young men and women go for plastic surgery, paying thousands of dollars for a procedure. Rather asked, “How long is it?”

“It’s a little longish,” Murphy said, “but, just like a nose, it can be trimmed.”

Rather again began to pace, and returned to the beginning of the broadcast. Although he made his reputation reporting on hurricanes, and still delights in covering them, he wasn’t sure that one of the nine full stories that evening should be floods in the Midwest. Murphy thought the floods merited a story because thousands of Ohio residents had been ordered to evacuate.

Rather returned to his office at around nine-fifteen, and an hour later was back in the fishbowl. “What about the conference call?” Rather asked as he entered, referring to a call made every morning to CBS’s bureau chiefs.

“We did it already,” said Murphy, who knew that Rather often skips this meeting. Unfazed, Rather asked, “So, Jimmy, if we had to choose a lead now what would it be?”

“Iraq,” Murphy said, just as he had earlier.

The average age of the people who watch the news on the three networks is sixty; only eight or nine per cent are between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. All three programs, with their repeated focus on health issues, interspersed with commercials for products like Mylanta and Viagra, reflect this. The content of the news is also similar. The year-end Tyndall Report, which monitors the three broadcasts, reported that CBS devoted more minutes to Iraq and slightly fewer to the Presidential campaign of John Kerry; during the Summer Olympics, NBC, whose sports division owned the rights, devoted nearly twice as many minutes of its newscast (a hundred and twelve) to the Olympics as did CBS and ABC combined. But, by Tyndall’s calculations, the minutes that each network devoted to such stories as terrorism in Iraq, the Presidential debates, and the Bush campaign were so close that they seemed to share a single assignment editor. CBS News is budgeted at about five hundred million dollars, ABC at about six hundred million, and NBC and MSNBC combined at about six hundred million. Each network employs between eighty and a hundred and ten or so correspondents, including anchors. ABC News earns just under a hundred million dollars and CBS somewhat less, while NBC earns about two hundred and seventy million dollars. (NBC has two cable news outlets; MSNBC barely breaks even, while its business network, CNBC, earns nearly three hundred million dollars.)

In December, the former CBS correspondent Bill Moyers said, “What’s happened to the house that Murrow built?” Edward R. Murrow, who was at CBS between 1935 and 1961, remains a CBS icon. “It’s now a shack on the side of the road.” Moyers was referring to cutbacks at all the networks not only in foreign bureaus and correspondents but in the air time given to serious stories.

“I know he’s wrong,” Rather said. “I recognize his frustration, maybe even anger.” He added, “What can I say? I love Bill.” Comparing the broadcast to what it was decades earlier, Rather said, “We had more resources in more places. We could move faster and better with fewer budget constraints. On the other hand, I think the broadcasts are better written now. They cover a wider range of news than they did then.” Rather and news executives at all three networks say that, because of advances in communications technology, coverage is often better than it used to be.

Walter Cronkite, who is eighty-eight, still has an office and a staff of four at CBS’s headquarters; he has a consultant’s contract, though he says he is not consulted. Cronkite doesn’t want the evening news to present a mixture of stories, the way a magazine does, because, he points out, there is too little time in a news broadcast—on CBS, about nineteen minutes, after commercials and promotions for upcoming stories and the local stations. One such promotion, featured by CBS in its December 15th broadcast, showed an irate Orlando mother striking a teen-ager on a school bus. This footage was promoted at the beginning of the broadcast and at each commercial break, suggesting to viewers that if they endured stories on Iraq and Social Security they would be rewarded with pictures of a good brawl. Bob Schieffer says, “When I came to work at CBS, CBS News was not a profit center. Now it is.” He went on, “CBS News has never been a charitable enterprise. But I think the effort to find a larger audience is driving this thing. Some people think the way to do that is to make it more entertaining. I, frankly, don’t.”

Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the networks have devoted more time to overseas news. Yet today Barry Peterson, a CBS correspondent based primarily in Tokyo, is responsible for covering all of Asia. CBS News usually has nine other correspondents based overseas—five in a hub office in London, three in Tel Aviv, one in Rome. It has no permanent bureau in the Arab or Muslim world, in Africa or South America. The network has small offices, although not correspondents, in several countries. Tom Fenton, who is seventy-four and had a thirty-four-year career, mainly as a foreign correspondent with CBS, writes in a new book, “Bad News,” that in the late seventies and early eighties “CBS News ran fourteen major foreign bureaus, ten mini foreign bureaus, and stringers in forty-four countries around the world.” Now, he told me, CBS relies increasingly on information supplied by video wire services and overseas broadcasters. “It’s television’s equivalent of outsourcing.”

Marcy McGinnis, who has been with CBS for nearly thirty-five years and is a senior vice-president for news coverage, thinks that critics like Fenton don’t count the approximately twenty-five people (including producers, technicians, local arrangers, and security details) that CBS has in Iraq. They don’t, she says, count CBS’s stake in a European satellite consortium, which has thirty-two separate broadcasters contributing pictures and information, or its satellite partners in other parts of the world. (In fact, this sounds suspiciously like outsourcing.) “We now cover the world better than we ever did,” she says.

McGinnis did not mention newspapers, but often a front-page story in that morning’s Times appears near the top of a newscast. “It’s in your own city, so it’s easy,” said Susan Zirinsky, a CBS executive producer, who thinks that such shortcuts too often replace “enterprise reporting.” Andy Rooney, who joined CBS as a writer forty-four years ago, and who has also been a news producer, says, “It’s infuriating. If it wasn’t for the New York Times, network news would have to shut down.”

At first, Rather reacts to this debate by expressing support for the good intentions of CBS managers. But, when I asked how he thought Murrow would feel about CBS’s having fewer correspondents and bureaus than it did a quarter century ago, Rather replied, “He wouldn’t feel good about it. Neither do I.” When I asked if he really believed that CBS News covered the world, he said, “I always believe it can be done. I remain committed to both the idea and the ideal that whatever shortcomings, real or imagined, anybody thinks we have in resources, money, that we can make up for it with determination and being smart and getting the very most out of the resources we have. I certainly don’t want to be trivial—about this I’m serious—but in this case I really believe in ‘The Little Engine That Could’; that is, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”

Dan Rather has always been sentimental, but it’s more evident now, no doubt because his final day as the anchor of the “CBS Evening News” is near. Late in the morning on the day I spent with him, Rather headed across the street to screen a piece for “60 Minutes Wednesday,” and I went to another screening room to view clips from a one-hour tribute to him that was being put together by Susan Zirinsky. It will air on March 9th. (When Tom Brokaw stepped down as anchor, in December, NBC News treated his leaving much like the retirement of a head of state, and gave it a two-hour special.)

Thirty years ago, as a production secretary in the Washington bureau, Zirinsky typed the manuscript of one of Rather’s books, “The Palace Guard.” Since then, she has been his producer in the field and on the “CBS Evening News,” and his executive producer on “48 Hours,” which, now called “48 Hours Mystery” and increasingly tabloid, she continues to produce. Zirinsky, who was the model for the producer played by Holly Hunter in the movie “Broadcast News,” is an unabashed Rather admirer. “A lot of people know Dan, and nobody knows him,” she says.

The clips show Rather as a newsman in Texas and in locales around America and the world. One sees Rather as a thin young man on Houston’s KHOU-TV, referring repeatedly to “Hurri-cun Carla”; hears Rather in a voice-over as Governor George Wallace attempts to halt integration at the University of Alabama; watches Rather crouching in a swamp in Tam Ky, to give a report as he trails marines in Vietnam, and helping to carry a wounded marine on a stretcher from a battlefield, while whispering to his producer not to include this footage in the broadcast. (It was included.)

Dan Irvin Rather was born in Wharton, an oil-patch town near the east coast of Texas, on October 31, 1931. The family moved to Houston when he was a year old, and the Rathers had two more children—Don, who recently retired as a football coach in Texas, and Patricia, who taught school in Texas, and who is also retired. The father, Daniel Irvin Rather, was a second-generation pipe layer for oil companies. Veda Byrl Rather, Dan’s mother, worked at odd jobs to earn extra income, but concentrated on rearing her children. In Wharton, they lived in a “shotgun house,” a cut above a shack but so named because the houses are “so small that you can hit everybody in the place with one shotgun blast,” Rather wrote in “I Remember: Growing Up in Texas,” one of three memoirs he’s written. In Houston, the Rather family had a slightly bigger house, and went to a Baptist church. Dan shared a bed with his brother, and his mother had to walk three miles round trip to the grocery store. Rather recalls that his father was so loyal to his employer, Humble Pipeline, that he refused to frequent any other company’s gas station. His mother, he says, was a natural diplomat and yet, quick to read people, she would occasionally say, “I don’t trust him.” “It wasn’t quite like living in Erskine Caldwell’s territory, but his ‘Tobacco Road’ wasn’t all that different,” he wrote.

Rather’s father and mother loved F.D.R. “I can hear my father saying, ‘We are the government,’ ” Rather told me. When Dan was ten, he came down with rheumatic fever. The radio became his companion. He listened to Jack Benny’s pauses, and practiced them. But what most excited him was listening to Murrow and his “boys”—William Shirer, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood—as they reported the Second World War.

Rather was the first member of his family to finish college. At Sam Houston State Teachers College, he took journalism courses and worked part time as an apprentice sportscaster for the college radio station. “I became a pretty good ad libber, because there’s no script,” Rather said. A journalism instructor, Hugh Cunningham, advised him to practice interviews and to read important books that his education had missed. He finished college in three years, graduating in August, 1953.

During the Korean War, Rather joined the Marines. He was discharged six months later, when the Corps learned that he had had rheumatic fever. He moved back to Houston and, for the next five years, held a succession of jobs for United Press International, the Houston Chronicle, and a radio station. He worked six days a week at the station, and persuaded his station manager to start a Sunday broadcast, featuring Dan Rather. “He gave up his only day off,” a college friend, Perry Smith, recalls. “We all thought he was nuts.”

In 1956, he met Jean Grace Goebel, when she was hired as a secretary at the radio station, and they were married within a year. “She was beautiful, and had a smile as wide as Texas,” Rather recalled. A daughter, Robin, was born in 1958; a son, Danjack, two years later. He joined Houston’s KHOU-TV, a CBS affiliate, as news director in January, 1960.

CBS first took notice of Rather—and of a talent he had for dramatizing himself and his stories—when Hurricane Carla hit and KHOU was the only station broadcasting from Galveston. “I remember he had himself tied to a telephone pole so he could continue to do his reporting even as the wind got more dangerous,” Walter Cronkite told me. “That was a reportorial stunt that certainly caught everyone’s eye, I think. And he did a darn good job of it.” Rather did not, in fact, tie himself to a pole, although he did get a heavy-link chain and rehearsed tying himself to a tree. Cronkite remembers recommending Rather to CBS executives.

CBS News offered Rather a job in 1961. He was paid an annual salary of seventeen thousand two hundred dollars—about seven thousand dollars more than he had been making—and assigned to the Dallas-based Southwest bureau. His father was impressed, but did not live to experience much of his son’s success; a few months later, a teen-ager driving a concrete truck slammed into his car. “It killed him instantly,” Rather says. Daniel Irvin Rather was fifty-two.

Rather became CBS’s Southern bureau chief, and was continuously on the road. On November 22, 1963, he was in Dallas and reported the assassination of President Kennedy. He received a series of promotions, first to the White House to cover Lyndon B. Johnson, and then, in 1965, to London, as bureau chief. Rather was able to ingratiate himself with two of Murrow’s boys. He asked the CBS commentator Eric Sevareid to recommend books on politics and history, and from the elegant Charles Collingwood he got a London tailor. He went to Vietnam the following year, where he replaced Morley Safer for about nine months. When Safer returned to Saigon, in August of 1966, Rather invited him for a drink in the bar of the Caravelle. Safer describes this encounter in his 1990 memoir, “Flashbacks”:

**{: .break one} ** The man was trying very hard to be courtly, but the effect was destroyed by the strange way he was dressed. It was not the green army fatigues and combat boots—though it was most unusual for correspondents to be dressed for war in Saigon—it was the leather shoulder holster and nickel-plated Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver strapped on the outside of his clothing. **

Rather denies the incident and says that he never owned a gun in Vietnam. Other differences followed. Eventually, hearing that Rather had disparaged his reporting, Safer stopped speaking to him. For years, they passed each other silently in the corridors at CBS. There was “an iciness,” Safer says. Rather says that they are now amicable colleagues; “perfectly proper” is how Safer describes the relationship.

When Rather returned to the United States, he became CBS’s chief White House correspondent, and covered the final two years of the Johnson Administration and the nearly six years of the Nixon Administration—the years of Vietnam protests and the Watergate scandal. At the height of Watergate, in March of 1974, at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Houston, Rather was called on by Nixon to ask a question. It was Rather’s home town, and members of the audience applauded. Nixon drew a laugh by saying, “Are you running for something?”

Rather quickly responded, “No, sir, Mr. President. Are you?”

Over the years, that exchange has been seen as evidence of an alleged political bias on Rather’s part; and Rather still believes that pressure on the network frightened CBS executives. There were complaints from CBS stations and calls from the White House to the CBS chairman, William Paley, and his executives, and in August of 1974 (the month Nixon resigned) Rather was replaced by Bob Schieffer. He came to New York and was the anchor for many “CBS Reports” documentaries.

The face and voice of CBS, however, was then Walter Cronkite, who was wary of Rather. He respected him for being “dogged” in his reporting, he recalls, but worried that he was “showboating.” Rather was in any case something new in network news: a star not because his name and his face were before millions of viewers nightly but because of his performance. When Rather covered a hurricane, he became as much a part of the story as the storm.

Cronkite intended to step down before he turned sixty-five, in 1981. Roone Arledge, the news president of ABC, tried to lure Rather to ABC, to become the anchor there, but, Rather told me, he couldn’t leave. “I believe in the dream, the magical, mystical kingdom of CBS News,” he said. “It may exist only in our minds, but that makes it no less real.” Chosen as Cronkite’s replacement, Rather had a plan to stamp his own personality on the broadcast. “I was determined to be a reporter-anchor,” he said, and he popularized the anchor-as-reporter by taking the evening news on the road—to, among other places, Tiananmen Square, Cuba, and, when the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Moscow. (Tom Bettag, who was Rather’s executive producer at CBS and is now the senior executive producer of ABC’s “Nightline,” remembers Tom Brokaw saying jokingly to Rather as they travelled to Czechoslovakia, “I swear to God, I’m going to kill you if you go to Romania if it falls!”) Some of Rather’s other ideas were perceived as weird. Perhaps too eager to prove that he was his own man, Rather would deliver the news standing up; to soften his image, he wore a sweater on the set. Cronkite’s broadcast had ranked first from 1968 until he left, and Rather clung to the lead until 1988, when Peter Jennings, of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” overtook him.

Controversy continued to pursue Rather. After Lawrence Tisch bought CBS, in 1986, Rather spoke out against Tisch’s plan to reduce news spending by ten per cent and to fire two hundred and fifteen news employees. His criticism was featured on the Op-Ed page of the Times. For a week in the fall of 1986, Rather concluded the newscast with a single word—“Courage”—and when he explained that “courage” was his father’s favorite word, people thought he was, well, a little nuts_._ Around the same time, Rather said he was mugged by a stranger on Park Avenue who, before punching him, asked, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”—an episode so peculiar that it put Rather in the tabloids. (Years later, people still spoke of this encounter as if it had never really happened, and when, in 1997, it was announced that the police had the deranged culprit in custody the story drew relatively scant coverage.) People also considered the CBS anchor a little strange because of the Ratherisms, many of which have been compiled and published on the Web and elsewhere. An informal sampling since 2000 might include these:

“One’s reminded of that old saying ‘Don’t taunt the alligator until after you’ve crossed the creek.’ ”

“If a frog had side pockets, he’d carry a handgun.”

“In Southern states they beat him like a rented mule.”

“This race is as hot and tight as a too-small bathing suit on a too-long car ride home from the beach.”

“If California is the big burrito, and Texas is the big taco, then Florida is the big tamale . . . and right now it’s only the tamale that counts.”

In Miami in 1987, Rather, upset that CBS was delaying the start of the “Evening News” to stay with U.S. Open tennis coverage, stalked off the set. He called the president of the news division, and, while he was away, the match ended and the sports people turned the broadcast over to news. The screen then went blank for six minutes.

The next year, in an interview with Vice-President George H. W. Bush, Rather pressed him about the Iran-Contra scandal, and Bush, whose advisers had prepared a response for him, said, “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set?”

The Bushes never quite forgave Rather, and the episode strengthened the belief of many conservatives that Rather was biased. In 2000, a new Web site, RatherBiased.com, began posting Rather’s alleged sins, including his supposedly gentler treatment of Democrats and the allegedly soft questions he asked Saddam Hussein during an exclusive interview in 2003. Bernard Goldberg, a former CBS correspondent, has written two books, both best-sellers, arguing that there is an insular, liberal bias at the networks, and Andy Rooney, a liberal himself, has told Larry King that “Dan is transparently liberal.” Jeff Fager, to whom Rooney reports on “60 Minutes,” and who was Rather’s executive producer on the “Evening News,” thinks that critics confuse bias for a good story with political bias. “He wakes up every day and wonders, Where’s my next big story?” Fager said.

Rather certainly brings an attitude to the news. “I have tried to speak truth to power,” he says, and adds a Ratherism: “I do have my biases, such as, I’m hard to herd and impossible to stampede.”

The network anchors are preposterously well paid. Rather earns about seven million dollars a year, and Peter Jennings about ten million. Brian Williams, on NBC, earns about ten million, and Katie Couric, of NBC, and Diane Sawyer, of ABC, between twelve and fifteen million each. While Jennings overtook Rather for first place in 1988, in the mid-nineties NBC’s “Nightly News,” with Tom Brokaw, overtook Jennings. Some think that Rather’s third-place standing is CBS’s fault, because it has afternoon- and local-news lead-ins that don’t deliver an audience to Rather. Rather clearly believes this. “Whatever you think of our present broadcast, and whatever you may think of me,” Rather said, “if you put Oprah Winfrey in front of me and one of the strong access programs behind me”—he cited “Wheel of Fortune”—“then I’ll win for you.” But the Rather factor is measurable. Twice a year, a firm called Marketing Evaluations produces for subscribers what is known as Performer Q Scores, which divide the percentage of the public that rates a personality “one of my favorites” by the percentage of the public aware of the personality. Rather’s Positive Q Score is comparable to that of his counterparts. Where one sees a bigger difference is in Rather’s Negative Q Score, which is more than twenty-five per cent higher than either Brokaw’s or Jennings’s. The only prominent news person with a higher negative rating than Rather is Katie Couric.

David Poltrack, CBS’s executive vice-president for research and planning, conceded that in recent years CBS has lost conservative, older male viewers to NBC because they were “unhappy with our coverage.” He continued, “The conservative part of this country, while talking about the liberal bias of the networks and the New York media, tends to speak more of Dan Rather representing that.” The “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace, who considers Rather a friend, says that Rather’s style reinforces the impression of bias. “Rather is a superb reporter, and dead honest,” Wallace told me. “But he’s not as easy to watch as Jennings or Brokaw.” Wallace does not watch Rather. “He’s uptight, and occasionally contrived,” Wallace explained. “It’s his style, and it’s been a very effective style. God knows, I believe him. But I don’t find him as satisfying to watch.”

Cronkite, who said that he often watched Brokaw, agreed with Wallace. To viewers, he said, it seemed “that Dan was playing a role of newsman, that he was conscious of this, whereas the other two appeared to be more the third-party reporter.” Don Hewitt, who created “60 Minutes,” and who prefers to watch Jennings, believes that ratings success is linked to the personality of the anchor. “The ‘Evening News’ is like Miss America, only it’s Mr. America,” he said. “If you’re in a three-network race and you come in third, then the public is against you.” In contrast to Brokaw and Jennings, Rather makes some viewers uncomfortable because he conveys discomfort with the camera.

Many of Rather’s friends and associates agree about one source of his discomfort: he feels trapped in the anchor chair. Howard Stringer, the chairman and C.E.O. of Sony America, who was Rather’s executive producer in the early eighties and then the president of CBS, says, “There is a certain frustration about his real contribution. He admired a reporter like Edward R. Murrow, out in the field, dodging bombs, not just sitting in a studio chair.” Andy Rooney believes that Rather is on the road so often because he’s ashamed of anchoring—“a dumb job.” Rooney explained, “To gain some credibility, they all feel obliged to go out and stand in the wind. They should either accept their role as a news reader or become a reporter.”

Rather has never been able to hide his emotions, including an almost reverential patriotism; after September 11th, on David Letterman’s show, he cried as he recited a verse from “America the Beautiful.” At a Harvard forum last July, Rather addressed a question about whether the press could have been more skeptical of the Bush Administration’s claims that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. He said yes but added, “Look, when a President of the United States, any President, Republican or Democrat, says these are the facts, there is heavy prejudice, including my own, to give him the benefit of any doubt, and for that I do not apologize.”

Andy Rooney calls Rather “a Southern gentleman.” “Loyalty” is the first word that comes to Richard Leibner, of N.S. Bienstock, Rather’s television agent. “How many people have had the same representative for forty years?” Leibner says. His father, Sol Leibner, died the day after September 11th, he recalls, at the age of ninety-two. Air traffic in and out of New York was suspended, and the family delayed a Long Island graveside service for five days. “Dan had worked around the clock Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. I had called Jean Rather and said, ‘Dan shouldn’t be there.’ Dan left the newsroom with Jean, stood at the cemetery, spoke at the graveside, and went back to the broadcast center. That’s who he is.” Peter Jennings says, “If I got in trouble anywhere in the world, and I had twenty-five cents, I would call Barbara”—Barbara Walters. “Then I’d call Dan.”

Back in the fishbowl at 2:30 p.m. on January 14th, Rather, Murphy, and others reviewed the mix of stories yet again. Arms folded, Rather offered Murphy a wager that ABC and NBC would lead with the weather. Murphy disagreed, and went down his list to a medical piece on statins.

“What’s gonna keep this piece from looking like another ‘Oh my God, another medical piece’?” Rather asked, not looking at Murphy or at me. (Earlier, I had asked Rather if there was a glut of “we’re on your side” medical stories.)

“We’ll do something clever,” one producer said.

“Let’s roll on,” Rather said. “Just know that I have some concern about ‘just another health piece.’ ”

Murphy said that a verdict was expected that afternoon in the military trial of Specialist Charles A. Graner, Jr., who was charged with abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib; the plan was to explain the verdict in a twenty-second “tell,” Murphy said. There was another Middle East story (about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) that would make the front pages of the next day’s newspapers, but, without pictures, it rated only a “tell.” A moment later, Rather told me, “The broadcast as set today I would say probably would not be the broadcast that the front office would ideally like. Not quite enough consumer news. Leading with something that is foreign or semi-foreign: Iraq and intelligence.”

Finally, Murphy talked about the new end piece, replacing Iranian rhinoplasty: a mentally disabled shoeshine man at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, who for decades had donated every cent he’d earned in tips to the hospital. It was exactly the kind of story “the front office” likes to end the week with, Rather said. “The big guys are not here,” Murphy chimed in, referring to Heyward and Moonves. “They’re three thousand miles away.”

The exchange was playful, but the anxiety in the newsroom was palpable; everyone knew that Heyward had gone to Los Angeles to present to Moonves his ideas for a re-formatted “CBS Evening News.” And everyone knew that Moonves was in competition with Tom Freston, the co-president of Viacom, to one day succeed Sumner Redstone as C.E.O. Ratings and profits will be an important measure of Moonves’s success, and Moonves has always known this. In late 2001, when I was reporting another piece on the networks, he told me, “The networks went through change when they went from being just networks to becoming part of larger corporations. The news division, for what was spent, was bringing less return than other areas of the company. . . . Earnings is what I’m judged on.” Moonves had programmed the comeback of CBS’s prime-time schedule, with such hits as “Survivor” and “C.S.I.,” and lowered the average age of its viewers. Moonves and Heyward agree that Rather’s departure offers an opportunity to make bold changes, and Moonves has told associates that a new plan for the “CBS Evening News” is now his top priority.

Because of the investigation of the National Guard story, and because Heyward, starting in the summer, had joined Moonves in pressing Rather to step down early, tension had crept into the relationship between Rather and Heyward, as it had crept into the relationships between Heyward and other employees. Heyward is fifty-four and sports a thick salt-and-pepper mustache. He has spent his career at CBS, as a writer and a producer. He has held his current job for nine years. There are those who, like Jim Murphy, believe that he “has done an exceptional job of keeping this place together.” But many fault him for failing to groom a successor to Rather. They say that he has been afraid of Rather. Above all, they grumble that he represents them—the corporation.

“Heyward ain’t Dick Salant,” Mike Wallace told me. “I trusted Salant, totally. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that way about not just Heyward but other news presidents who represented management. Corporate management hated Salant because he told them the truth.”

According to Hayward, four decades ago the news division wasn’t held to the same business standards as the rest of the corporation. Today, any news president is “expected to generate profits and not just prestige,” he says. “And, like it or not—I do like it—has to contend with ratings, marketing, promotion, prime-time schedules, affiliates: the economic business realities of being part of a large media company. I think I’ve helped the news division by being a savvy corporate citizen.” Among many news employees, the impulse to want a bolder leader is balanced by a fear that Heyward would be replaced by a stranger who knows neither them nor CBS’s traditions.

Before Moonves met with Heyward in Los Angeles, Moonves told me, “Badly as our evening news is doing, it’s still watched by seven to eight million people a night. That’s still a lot of people. So, clearly, the idea that this thing is obsolete is silly.” But he was ready to gamble on a big change because “being in third place affords you great leeway.” Heyward believed that CBS could break away from the pack by becoming less “anchor-centric.” He was going to propose building up the role of the correspondents and granting them more on-air time for each piece, which meant subtracting time from the anchor. Heyward wanted more in-depth reports, and also he wanted correspondents to inject more personality, more emotion, into their pieces. His model was “that guy”—he pointed to a picture of Murrow—“taking you to the roof during the blitz.”

Peter Jennings worries that by encouraging correspondents to voice their feelings we encourage them to search for those emotional “moments” that can eclipse reporting or ideas. “People say I’m too aloof,” he said. “In some ways, that’s a compliment. It is not my emotions that matter on a story. It is the emotions of the people we’re covering. Edward R. Murrow used to go up on the rooftops of London. Do you think his aim was to let Americans know how he was feeling? His aim was to let the American people know how the people of London survived.” At the heart of Heyward’s proposal, however, was something that television journalists always want: more time for correspondents to offer more information and more context.

What Moonves sought for news, an associate told me, was “a more entertaining, faster paced” newscast, one that might attract more forty-five-year-olds—not the approach favored by Heyward and other CBS News executives. And, short of hiring someone who might draw a different audience—Katie Couric, for instance—Moonves’s inclination was to move toward multiple anchors. The chief White House correspondent, John Roberts, would probably be part of this mix, but it wasn’t clear to Moonves that all the candidates would come from inside CBS.

What was clear to Rather on January 14th—and clear to almost everyone else at CBS News—was that Moonves, the president of CBS, not Heyward, the president of news, would be making the final decisions. A story spread about a meeting that Moonves had once organized with Heyward; Betsy West, Heyward’s deputy; and the three producers of CBS’s magazine shows at the time—Don Hewitt, Jeff Fager, and Susan Zirinsky. Moonves was agitated that Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer, of ABC, were persuading Jennifer Lopez and other celebrities to appear on their magazine shows, while CBS was not. He kept asking, one producer recalls, “Are you dead? Why shouldn’t you guys be going after that stuff?”

“We don’t make deals with celebrities on what we may ask, nor do we promise them anything,” Hewitt said. (He reluctantly confirmed the substance of the meeting.)

Moonves mentioned other celebrity names, including Justin Timberlake.

“Who’s Justin Timberlake?” Hewitt asked.

Moonves, who also confirmed that the meeting took place, told me, “I don’t expect ‘60 Minutes’ to go out and do Jennifer Lopez. However, there is a place for that on the magazines on occasion. Do we at CBS consider that we’re above that?” He insists that it was “an exploratory meeting,” albeit “very positive.” And he added, “Yes, I am interested in getting good ratings. It helps the bottom line, and it helps the company.”

Rather and one of his longtime “60 Minutes Wednesday” producers, Mary Mapes, were among the many journalists who had looked into reports that George W. Bush used influence to get into the Texas Air National Guard in 1968 and cut corners while he served. All “60 Minutes” correspondents depend on their producers; a correspondent may appear in twenty-five pieces a year, but a producer reports only four or five in the same period. And Mapes was much admired for her previous work, especially the story of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

When, last August, Mapes told Josh Howard, the new executive producer of “60 Minutes Wednesday,” that she had sensational new information about Bush’s military record, he was excited, as was Rather, according to the outside investigation. No one had to remind Howard that the Wednesday program was up for review when the prime-time schedule was set last May, and was given an extended life only on orders from Moonves.

By early September, Mapes was telling Rather and Howard that she had three documents, dating back to 1972, proving that Bush had failed to show up or take a required physical, and had been suspended from flying. Moreover, she said, a fourth document proved that senior officers had covered up these failures. But she was alarmed about competitors, including USA Today, who were pursuing the same documents, and she quickly arranged for four experts to authenticate them. Josh Howard tentatively decided that the National Guard story would replace an Ed Bradley report produced by one of the network’s top investigators, David Gelber, which explored how the Bush Administration had used bad intelligence—a document saying that Iraq was trying to get so-called yellow-cake uranium from Niger, to make an atom bomb—to promote its case for an invasion of Iraq. The story was not new, but the reporting was considered fresh.

Rather had spent four days covering the Republican National Convention in New York, then three days in Florida covering Hurricane Frances. Four days before the National Guard program was to air, Rather said, he alerted Heyward that this was a potentially “radioactive” story. Heyward assigned Betsy West to vet it.

Heyward told me that if the Rather piece hadn’t been ready the Ed Bradley piece would not have been a last-minute substitute, because it ran twice the normal length. Bradley disputes that, insisting that David Gelber told him “he was kept until late in the day on the eighth on the possibility that the piece would run.” He also said that the piece was mixed and color-corrected, the two final procedures to ready a story for broadcast.

In any case, Rather got the broadcast, and he told viewers that CBS had dug up “new documents and new information” revealing that Bush had benefitted from political favors to avoid the draft. Part of the story was the interview with Ben Barnes. But the rest of the report relied on the documents, and, within hours, the Internet was filled with assertions that they were fake. Although the challenges continued, and rival news organizations produced experts questioning the documents’ authenticity, CBS and Rather didn’t budge. Backed by Rather, Mapes produced pieces for “CBS Evening News” on September 10th and 13th, and for the September 15th “60 Minutes Wednesday” in which Rather offered more “proof” in defense of the original story. After twelve days, Heyward reversed course and issued a statement on CBS’s behalf: “Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic. . . . We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret.” Rather opposed the Heyward apology, but on the evening news he apologized for failing to “fully scrutinize the documents and their source.”

On September 22nd, Moonves appointed the outside panel, called the Independent Review Panel. It included Louis D. Boccardi, a former journalist and the retired C.E.O. of the Associated Press; and former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, a Republican, who had served under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The panel was directed to report its findings to Moonves, not to CBS News.

Rather was not happy about the appointment of Thornburgh, though publicly he did not criticize the choices. On January 3rd, David Buksbaum, a former CBS News executive and a close friend of Rather’s, said, “I am part of this group that advised Dan on this and we said, ‘You’ve got to say this is unfair. You need a third party in there that knows something about television.’ ” Buksbaum was unhappy that Thornburgh’s Washington law firm, Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham, was to conduct the inquiry. CBS News employees also pointed out that Sumner Redstone, the Viacom chairman and C.E.O., to whom Moonves reported, had endorsed Bush, saying, “a Republican administration is better for our company.” It was a reminder that Viacom lobbies the government that CBS News covers.

No one argued that Redstone, or Moonves, would edit news pieces, but in the end Heyward, with the concurrence of other news executives, decided to hold the Ed Bradley piece. In explaining CBS’s reasons to Bradley and Gelber, Heyward and other news executives said that if CBS were to air it in the wake of the National Guard fiasco it would make it appear that CBS was determined to defeat Bush. Many at CBS News agreed, but with reluctance—and with anger, directed at Mapes and Rather. Heyward also told Bradley and Gelber that the segment needed more work. Bradley understood the first reason but not the second. “I respect his decision not to put it on,” Bradley said of Heyward, though he also said, “I thought the piece was good to go.” The piece was never aired.

From late September through the Christmas holidays, employees at CBS News wondered, Would Rather be fired? Would Heyward? Who else? What would be the long-term effect on CBS News’s reputation? “When I got into this business, I really thought that what we did in the media was important. I think the public felt the same way,” the “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft told me. “I’m not sure the public feels that way anymore. They’ve become more cynical, and there are reasons for that cynicism.”

Rather says that he is “comfortable” with Moonves playing a larger part in news. “The baseline for me—I can be as dumb as a brick about a lot of things, but at least I’m smart enough to know what my job is here, my job is to cover news, get stories, and to get them on the air, and to not worry about what the corporate structure is, or how it works. And another baseline is that Moonves is a terrific leader. He’s sharp, he’s book smart, and he’s done great things for CBS as a whole. Look at where we were when he came aboard.” Moonves is more reserved about Rather, telling friends last fall that he suspected Rather would escape being fired because he was not the reporter he claimed to be on the September 8th broadcast but had appeared only to conduct scripted interviews. What Moonves was really hoping was that the report would spare Heyward. He said that he thought Heyward walked the “tightrope” between representing the news division and the corporation with great skill. Moonves also told friends he was convinced that he had to be more involved in the news division. For his part, Heyward knew that he might be a target of the panel report. “Obviously, this has been on my watch,” he told me.

Rather worried that his reputation would be stained by the one broadcast. He worried that CBS News would become less aggressive. He worried about Thornburgh. He worried about Mapes, to whom he said he still felt loyal. He believed that the story was essentially correct—that Bush did benefit from political pull and failed to meet his obligations. He didn’t know that Don Hewitt was among the first CBS employees interviewed by the panel. “The first question Thornburgh asked was ‘Is CBS News intimidated by Dan Rather?’ ”

“Mr. Thornburgh, I couldn’t have said it better,” Hewitt said. He told me, “I didn’t want to answer the question.” But he did.

Rather also knew that he had lost leverage at CBS. His previous contracts guaranteed that he would occupy the anchor chair, but that guarantee ended in 2002. His contract expires at the end of 2006, and he had wanted to step down as anchor on March 9, 2006—his twenty-fifth anniversary.

Despite the critics, the announcement that Rather’s last day would come a year sooner was also greeted with sadness. Lee Cowan, a Dallas-based correspondent who is thirty-nine and considers Rather a mentor, said, “We will lose panache. I’m very proud, even after the problems we’ve had, to call people on the phone and tell them, ‘I’m Lee Cowan with CBS News with Dan Rather.’ If he’s not there, I wonder what our identity will be.”

Moonves received a copy of the panel’s report on December 29th while he was on his honeymoon in Mexico. (Moonves had married Julie Chen, “The Early Show” co-anchor, six days before.) “I read it three or four times in depth,” he said. He was “impressed” with the panel’s thoroughness, and “upset” that there seemed to be no system of checks and balances, that news executives neither insisted on knowing Mary Mapes’s sources nor vetted the experts. “I do not know our stories before they air,” Moonves told me. “The separation of church and state really existed. I think maybe to an extent that is no longer warranted, being that something like this could happen.” While Moonves was reading the report, Rather was reporting on the tsunami.

It took Rather forty-three hours in the air to return home, and he arrived at his apartment at about midnight on Sunday, January 9th. The report was made public the next morning. Moonves issued a statement saying that he was terminating Mary Mapes immediately. He also asked for resignations from Betsy West, Josh Howard, and Howard’s deputy producer, Mary Murphy. (West, Howard, and Murphy have not submitted their resignations, and have retained legal counsel; none have spoken publicly about the report.) Moonves, in his statement, said that the broadcast “would have benefitted from a more direct involvement on Rather’s part,” but that since Rather had “already apologized,” and had “voluntarily” announced that he was stepping down as anchor, “we believe any further action would not be appropriate.” He acknowledged that there were “questions about accountability at CBS News,” but he declined to punish Heyward because, he said, Heyward had warned West and Howard to be careful “to defend ‘every syllable’ of the segment,” but his “directives were not implemented.”

The panel faulted Betsy West for not following up on Heyward’s instructions, but did not look into why Heyward did not follow up on his own orders. Nor did the panel dwell on the fact that as early as September 10th Josh Howard, the producer, had expressed doubts about the documents and conveyed these doubts to Heyward. Moonves did not testify, but he told me on January 11th that he spoke with Heyward about the need to authenticate the sources and documents on September 9th or 10th—he’s not certain of the exact date. “I’m not a journalist, but the first three questions I asked they were not able to answer—starting with the first one, Who is the source?” he said.

Early in the morning the day the report came out, Walter Cronkite was in his office at CBS headquarters. When Cronkite finished reading what he calls a “remarkable” document that “will be a standard study in journalism schools,” he walked down the hall to Moonves’s office and stuck his head in. “You did a terrific job for us today,” he told Moonves. The loquacious Moonves, who started his career as an actor, was momentarily speechless. “I almost started to cry,” Moonves said later. One thing he didn’t say, Cronkite told me, was that he thought Moonves’s statement should have been more critical of Rather and Heyward.

CBS’s problems, the report said, “were caused primarily by a myopic zeal to be the first news organization to broadcast what was believed to be a new story.” The panel faulted CBS for engaging in a “strident defense of the September 8 segment while failing to adequately probe whether any of the questions raised had merit.” Mapes was a primary target—faulted for carelessness and overzealousness—but Rather was not spared. He delegated too much to Mapes, the panel report said, and then failed to acknowledge mistakes.

“I felt throughout, based on the panel’s report, that the ‘sin’ Andrew did was he trusted his lieutenants, and his lieutenants trusted Mary Mapes,” Moonves told me. “There clearly was a systemic problem.” Many of Heyward’s colleagues at CBS News, including many who like and admire him, wonder whether he would have survived had he been—like former news presidents such as Fred Friendly, Richard Salant, and Bill Leonard—less of a “savvy corporate citizen.” Was the panel, some wondered, giving its client, Les Moonves, what he wanted?

The panel suggested that Mapes and others were driven to get a scoop, but it did not explore ratings pressures from the corporate parent. It looked at whether CBS News had a political bias, and though it “found certain actions that could support such charges,” it wrote that it “cannot conclude that a political agenda” drove decisions. The panel reached no “definitive conclusion” about whether the documents were fake; the New York Observer last week reported that CBS News had hired a private investigator to pursue that question. And the panel was silent on a mystery: Who had the power to compel CBS to push aside normal checks and balances and to insist that the September broadcast was, as Rather had said, “right on the money”?

The day the report appeared, Mapes issued a statement: “I am terribly disappointed in the conclusions of the report.” She also expressed shock at “the vitriolic scapegoating” that Moonves showed in terminating her. The next day, Rather sent an internal message to fellow CBS News employees saying that his “strongest reaction is one of sadness and concern” for the four colleagues who lost their jobs. “We should take seriously the admonition of the report’s authors to do our job well and carefully,” he said, and it’s also important to pick up on the panel’s “admonition” that the report should not chill CBS’s efforts to cover controversial issues. One senior producer who likes Rather but finds him truly strange read the statement and called it “a self-parody,” as if “he were our leader.” Rather ended his message to the troops without apology or concession. He simply concluded, “Lest anyone have any doubt, I have read the report, I take it seriously, and I shall keep its lessons well in mind.”

Three days after the report was released, Rather told me, “You can never check and recheck enough. It’s an old lesson of journalism.” We were in his office, with the lights dimmed, and he refused to speak ill of Mapes, saying of her and the others, “I know how loyal they’ve been to me.” When I asked if this loyalty was misplaced, he said, “I’m not going to debate the specifics of the report. There was no chance to cross-examine people. This is where I stand: the panel has spoken. I read it. I absorbed it and have it very much in mind.”

When I asked Rather what he had “in mind,” he looked intent. “I’m not arguing with the panel—they are honorable people,” he said. “But I worked with all of these people for a long while, and neither in my mind nor in my heart am I going to give them up.” His eyes were wet, and he paused for a few seconds to compose himself. To friends, he has said he was heartened that the panel declared that it couldn’t prove political bias or that the documents were fake. He was puzzled that these facts did not qualify as headlines.

At 3:56 p.m. on January 14th, Rather sat in the anchor chair and did “Newsbreak” for the CBS stations, giving them a preview of that night’s “CBS Evening News.” Rather had told Eric Wybenga, who often writes the script for his daily CBS radio commentary, that he wanted to comment on a front-page story on a C.I.A. report warning that turmoil in Iraq would produce more terrorists. He went upstairs to write it himself. He closed the door, sat at his laptop, and ten minutes later walked across the hall to read the comment, which took ninety seconds. Since the Bush Administration has, “from the beginning, depicted Iraq as a front line in the global war on terrorism, this finding has the potential to create embarrassment,” Rather said, in his best anchorman voice. “However, looked at another way, the report can be seen as justifying the White House stand.” He did a flawless reading in one take.

After chatting a bit more and putting on a red tie, at 5:20 p.m. Rather returned to the anchor chair, where except for another visit to makeup, he would be stationed until the newscast. He read from a teleprompter a series of promotional spots that he personalizes for various local stations—“Back to you, Wayne and Mary Ellen”—before responding to a question from the local anchors, who draw authority from the “voice of God.” He did these until it was almost six, and, for the first time that day, he reviewed his own script and “tells,” along with the scripts of the correspondent pieces. He then rehearsed.

At six-twenty-five, Jim Murphy headed for the control room, where Rather’s face filled the big screen built into his desk. Two smaller monitors, to his left and his right, contain the newscasts of NBC and ABC, without sound, so that when they all return to the fishbowl, soon after Rather signs off, Murphy can answer Rather’s immediate question: “What’s the first story they led with, the weather?” ABC led with a weather story, Murphy said, and NBC included a weather “tell” in Brian Williams’s opening. Rather half smiled. “Did the others have anything we envied?” he asked.

Soon after he closed the broadcast, telling viewers, “And that’s part of our world,” Rather returned to his office. On this particular day, he wanted me to understand another thing about the panel’s report: “I don’t want to revisit this subject because I don’t want to rekindle hard feelings, controversy. I have to leave it there or it will be impossible to move on.” Did he feel as though he were living through a storm? I had asked earlier in the day. Yes, he said, adding, “But one thing about storms: they never last.”

Rather says that he is looking forward to “60 Minutes,” and that he feels welcome, although people there expressed concern to me that the report has damaged Rather and, in turn, might damage them. Rather also wants to be sure that he has a job on “60 Minutes” if the Wednesday program is cancelled.

Friends worry about Rather’s life after the “CBS Evening News.” They know that he enjoys reading, and retreating to a cabin in Beaverkill, New York, where he fishes for trout, or to a house the Rathers have in Lakeway, Texas, where Jean spends summers, and where Dan tries to spend part of August. But they also know that work frames his life. Perry Smith, who retired several years ago after twenty-five years as a public-affairs manager for Exxon, told me about chatting with Rather last summer in Lakeway, and hearing that a small plane had just crashed nearby. Rather said, “Let’s go!” They rushed off to survey the wreckage, and learned that there were six fatalities. “Dan got on his cell phone and called CBS radio in New York and got on the air,” Smith said.

Rather is much less visible around town than either Brokaw or Jennings. He works late, and spends a lot of time with his family, including his son, Danjack, who is an assistant D.A. in Manhattan, and his daughter, Robin, who lives in Austin, and with his two grandchildren. When, on occasion, one spots Rather at a book party or any other sort of celebration, he often appears awkward, as if he were fulfilling an obligation. A moment later, he is gone.

Rather is preoccupied with his reputation, and said, of himself, “I hope it will be said: ‘He never sold out. He didn’t cease trying to be a pull-no-punches, play-no-favorites reporter in order to meet what some people see as the tenet of anchoring, which is “Work hard never to offend anybody, don’t put your hands on anything that is hot.” ’ ” He paused before adding that he had kept at it over a “long period of time.” He called this his “peasant stubbornness.”

His thoughts then drifted to his boyhood. “It does take something to stay, and stick it out,” he said. “And it’s easy when you’re blowing out opponents. When you win every game fifty to thirteen, it’s always a happy locker room. You get to kiss the cheerleaders, toast a beer with the guys, and just feel terrific. But it’s rare in life when every season you blow out every opponent fifty to thirteen. I remember our high-school football coach, a great guy, Lamar Camp. Jean has warned me about using sports analogies, but I’ll go ahead. He’d say, ‘If the other team fumbles on their one-yard line and you’re first and goal from a yard out, everybody wants the ball. But if you’re on the road and the wind and the crowd’ ”—his voice broke—“ ‘are against you and you’re down by four and you got to drive the length of the field with not much time, that’s the test.’ Sometimes that’s what you have to do. Give me a quarterback who, when the ball is wet and the winds are in his face, on the road, the crowd’s against him and it’s fourth and goal with the game on the line—give me a quarterback who can get it in there. In some ways and some days, if you work in network news, you feel that way. If you’re the anchorperson, you get the money, you get the glory when there is any, but you’re the guy that’s got to get it in there.”

Then he started to quote “a great old Baptist hymn” that he called “What If This Is the Last Time.” With tears trickling down his cheeks, he continued, “Not just now, when it might seem more appropriate, but almost the entire length and breadth of my time at CBS, I’d think, What if this is the last time?” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the March 7, 2005, issue.

Ken Auletta began contributing to The New Yorker in 1977 and has written the Annals of Communications column since 1993.

One is the former CBS anchorman. The other is Robert Redford, who plays Rather in the new film “Truth.”

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.